My only thinking to this though is that ideas like the OP’s don’t seem any better and also seems lazy. Just throwing in more trash and saying “this is a new challenge” is more lazy than a timer I’d argue.
The OP emphasizes using “strategy”, but adding an extra step to each pull of “sheep moon, repent star” isn’t any more strategic. That is how the game was played in 10 years ago.
I’m all for new forms of content, but this idea of adding health sponges to dungeons sounds droll. People already hate the health sponges of Torghast. Why would we implement the same idea to dungeons? Unless they form basically 5 man raids, where bosses or mini-bosses in trash have true raid-like mechanics, I don’t think this offers anything in the way of strategy.
If they implemented Classic/BC difficulty dungeons now, people would be bored out of their minds. Go back to Classic right now - CC is rarely used.
It’s not 2006 any more, we have 14 more years of experience and the same level of difficulty doesn’t cut it anymore. That’s why people absolutely demolish Classic content on characters 10 levels below what it was designed for.
There’s a difference between a cheese strat that’s creative and a cheese strat that involves a lot of waiting.
The only way this could really work is if they arbitrarily limited the use on CDs such as Lust/Hero. Otherwise players would be sitting around waiting for it for every difficult pull.
Besides this, it can also be said that there IS an ‘endurance mode’ in the people who get in over their skiis and decide to stick it out to the grim end timer or not.
Some friends of mine were running a 12 SoA when a dps flaked and took off after a boss. They 4-manned the rest of that run. I was hanging out on disc visiting and heard the whole thing.
Once you’re reaching even the 15 range, avoidable stuff starts one-shotting you with extreme ease and unavoidable stuff starts doing very noticeable damage.
In the +20 range (which is where the endgame gear should be coming from if Blizzard gave a damn about M+) a lot of unavoidable stuff becomes very painful.
If what you’re proposing is implemented, you’d be absolutely suffering very, very early on.
We already saw this design in BC Heroics anyways. Very early on, when people didn’t know how to play, specs that were regarded as lacking specific utilities just did not get invited to badge farms.
The secret genius of M+ is that when an entire dungeon is one “encounter”, the various different classes can have strengths and weaknesses that shine. One class might be better at boss fights, another might be better at trash. This class brings a dispel, this class brings an immunity. Different utilities can help you save extra time or avoid a dangerous situation, allowing many classes to shine. Right now, in M+, almost every spec is playable. There are only like two Class/Role combinations that are sketchy, everyone else bring benefits that can make them justified in different ways. Even Rogues, who in raiding right now are seen as a liability, find a place in M+ because of Shroud, which doesn’t provide a direct damage utility but frees up a pot to be used for DPS purposes in dungeons where skips are used.
M+ has an elegant genius that is vastly underappreciated, simply because you have bitter players who cannot succeed and want to lash out at what they believe is an “undeserved” defeat. Although the reality is, people actually secretly like blaming the timer. Blaming the timer and still walking away with loot in the Vault feels much better to these players then when the game righteously smites them for failing and tells them to go home - because those players, when struck down, simply unsub - their ego does not allow them to believe they’re bad at the game.
This might bring me back to the game. I left because there are only two gearing paths: pvp and M+. I’m not a pvp’er and the M+ timers caused me so much anxiety that I really dreaded running them. I support this idea.
This isn’t relevant to the topic at hand. Just because Blizzard has neglected both class balance and dungeon design doesn’t mean both can’t be worked on.
And how would you counter the “waiting ten minutes” for all our cool down to come back up tactic? The reason mythic+ has a timer is to keep groups for sitting there waiting for major cool downs to come back up.
If you kill a mob in a pull but don’t complete it then make the whole pack respawn. Sorry your zerg strats aren’t the only way the game can be developed.